Slashdot Mirror
Police Officers Seek Right Not To Be Recorded
linzeal writes "When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop. Judges, juries, and legislatures support the police overwhelmingly on this issue, with only a few cases where those accused of 'shooting' the cops being vindicated through the courts."
But don't...
The police and the courts should bear the following in mind when considering the recordings:
"If the police are doing nothing wrong, then they have absolutely nothing to fear from being recorded".
Unfortunately the "recording" of police should not be left entirely to police owned CCTV systems. Because those systems can malfunction at the most inconvenient times, causing the images to disappear right when, for example, someone called Charles de Menezes gets shot in the head for his crime of wearing a jacket on a warm day.
While the police have a job to do, and most of them do a damned good one at that; they are still human beings. And as such not infallible and not immune to all sorts of temptation - from wrongly kicking someone in the face who probably deserved it (but deserving has no place in law), to covering one's or one's buddy's ass in an ugly situation, these things can and DO happen. People should not be punished for recording something that is happening - especially in a public place or in the privacy of the recorder's own home. The Romans coined the saying: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The government cannot be trusted blindly. There lies the path to tyranny.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
One last tidbit from the article worth reading
For the second time in less than a month, a police officer was convicted from evidence obtained from a videotape. The first officer to be convicted was New York City Police Officer Patrick Pogan, who would never have stood trial had it not been for a video posted on Youtube showing him body slamming a bicyclist before charging him with assault on an officer. The second officer to be convicted was Ottawa Hills (Ohio) Police Officer Thomas White, who shot a motorcyclist in the back after a traffic stop, permanently paralyzing the 24-year-old man."
Except he didn't disobey orders -- he was on a bicycle down the street and couldn't have heard orders from a foot officer up the block -- nor was he doing anything different than all the other cyclists -- and Officer Patrick Hogan was convicted of assault for what he did. He also lied about it until the video came out. Nice of you to leave out the facts, apologist bootlicking shill. And oh, he was a jock in high school. Figures. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/02/19/2009-02-19_nypd_fires_rookie_cop_caught_on_youtube_.html
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
The ACLU has taken at least two cases in that area.
The Maryland motorcycle case: "This prosecution by the Maryland State Police and Harford County State's Attorney is profoundly dangerous, and seems meant to intimidate people from making a record of what public officials do," said David Rocah, Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Maryland. "It is hard to imagine anything more antithetical to a democracy than for the government to tell its citizens that they do not have the right to record what government officials say or do or how they behave."
The video is on YouTube.
umm no... In the arrest of Ernesto Miranda, the police followed the letter of the current laws. His lawyer objected and stated that current policy of not requiring the explanation of 5th amendment rights was directly in violation of the 5th amendment. The supreme court agreed and Ernesto Miranda was re tried excluding his confession and was found guilty of rape and kidnapping.
Check out "The Wire". Amazing show.
If you want to get good video quality in most lighting conditions and to be able to zoom in and catch cops doing their thing from a distance that makes it obvious who they are then you need to buy a good video camera.
Canon GL-1 and GL-2 are really good for this and are rather cheap in the used market for a near broadcast quality DV camera. you do not want HD because HD is not good in low light, and you want optical image stabilization with a long zoom. keep a tape recorded with junk on it in your pocket, and if you are chased by police, press eject, swap tapes, and ditch the good tape in a nearby bush or other items. If recording from a few hundred feet away, you will have a lot of time to do this and can plausibly act like you did not hear the cop.
If your video is good enough for TV broadcast, lots of tv stations will play it. plus when put on youtube it helps incriminate the officer as more details can be seen.
Stay a few hundred feet from the cops and you have not only time to ditch them, but they cant identify you. dress dark if at night, dress in drab colors if daytime... dont stand out.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Whether or not the police intend to behave illegally is irrelevant. Whether or not they follow the law is.
"I mean, I didn't intend to rob that old lady, but when I came around the corner she was just standing there with her purse half-open." Would you excuse this person from robbery? Same laws apply to the police as to average citizens.
"But this one goes to 11!"
How about the recent story about the police saying that their patrol car tape was erased, and a citizen managing to prove that they were hiding it from him.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/418746_video.html
Why should we trust the police? We give them the right to carry guns and use them on citizens!
There's always the now-concluded and consistently excellent The Shield, based off of the real-life Rampart Division of the LAPD.
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
For the people that obviously didn't read the article, here's some additional context:
---
Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where "no expectation of privacy exists" (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.
---
As much as the OP would like you to think so, these states don't have a law saying it's illegal to video the police. In fact, reading that last sentence would probably lead a reasonable person to conclude that in 11 or those 12 states, recording the police in public would be legal.
You're wrong yourself. We have all rights not explicitly given to the government. The Bill of Rights just codifies a few of the most important ones. The Constitution explicitly says that any rights not given to the government are retained by the people.
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
It is an odd paradox that the further people are removed from having used the ammo box the more they see it as some sort of solution to tyranny. Ask Randy Weaver's wife how well that worked out. Or David Koresh.
I have considerable deployment time as a scout sniper in the USMC and I regularly shoot in long range tactical matches. Usually place well. Knowing what I know about the force capability of even the national guard, I have 0% interest in joining some kind of armed insurrection put together by a bunch of weekend shooters with instruction jackets that consist of having watched a Magpul video and accumulated 1000 posts on gun forums.
People who don't know their stuff think it sounds really awesome printed on a flag or the like, but those of us who've seen the elephant hope you all concentrate really hard on the first couple of boxes.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
The bicyclist being slammed by the officer. The officer shooting the biker at the traffic stop.
I had read about this the other evening and was really disturbed. My first reaction was the tired and cliched "if you're not guilty, then you have nothing to worry about."
The thing to me though, is that after they started putting cameras in police cars it was trumpeted as being such a great thing for the officers. How the cameras have saved so many officers and/or brought criminals to justice, that otherwise may have gotten away with their crimes. Think about all of those shows with police car footage, where someone gets pulled over, shoots a cop, and drives off. The storyline is something like "if it hadn't been for dashboard cameras, this officer's killers may have never been brought to justice."
But things work both ways. There have been some grievous abuses of citizens by the police, that may have never come to light if someone hadn't been there with a camera.
There are good cops and bad cops. I've had encounters with both types. Fortunately for me I've never had my skull cracked open by either. But I feel like, if we don't have the option to record our encounters with law enforcement on the same level that law enforcement has to record their encounters with us, then we are all in trouble. From the police standpoint, I can see the argument that a citizen's recording could be biased or doctored as it doesn't have the same type of safeguards that police footage is supposed to have. But again, this works both ways. I don't know if there is citizen oversight or some type of neutral chain of custody for police dashboard video, but I've heard more than a few accounts (first hand and news stories) of video becoming "lost." To me it's not right that the people in authority are the only ones with a copy of the tape. Citizen or cop, there can be bias and misuse either way, but this can be compensated for by combining videos from both as well as eye-witness accounts to reconcile the stories to gain a more accurate description of events.
In addition to having a camera available mounted in their car, the police also have the option of calling for backup to assist on the scene. As a citizen (I've been arrested before) I've never had the option of calling for backup/witnesses to my arrest. In a one on one encounter with a police officer, who is there to guarantee my safety and tell my side of the story? As far as I've ever experienced when it comes time to go to court, you already have a strike against your credibility because, to have an encounter with the police means that you had to have been doing something to get their attention. What hasn't really been brought up is why you've gotten their attention. Did you actually do something to warrant their attention or did the officer have you pegged for some other reason. The way you look, the car you drive, the people you know, the places you go, etc.
As someone already pointed out, a lot of authority amounts to trust. Who do we trust to safeguard our liberties and protect society in general. As people we mainly have to trust each other. I could create a nightmare for some random stranger right now by calling the police and making some false accusation. There are laws against this, but in the time it would take to sort this out, damage would be done. In the same way, a rouge police officer could do the same. I could have an encounter with the police right now and levy some accusation against an officer. Again, in the time it would take to sort this out, damage would be done.
I think that the police and citizenry are both well served with the right to record our interactions with each other. It could only stand to increase the amount of trust we have to place in each other and be an effective deterrent to any possible abuse of that trust by rouge authority. The best possible thing to happen right now for the police (nationally) would be for their union to stand up, support and encourage the rights of the people to record the police in the course of their jobs just as the people have encouraged the police to do the same.
Redundant facts in the course of figuring out a crime certainly could only help to serve justice and any differences between the facts (recordings) would strengthen a case one way or another. Why should the police be the only arbiter of the facts and evidence?